The Need For Rare Earths: Dr. Ayman EL-Refaie

Rare earth elements (REE) are a silent but integral piece of everyday, modern technologies. The world’s dominant supplier of these important elements is China, but the United States has increasingly focused on leveling the playing field. President Donald Trump’s recent interest in acquiring mineral-rich Greenland could create a new market for these precious elements.

Dr. Ayman EL-Refaie is a professor at Marquette University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He has been teaching there for 10 years. Before his time as a professor, he worked for General Energy at the Global Resource Center. EL-Refaie’s research interests include electrical machines and drives, power electronics and systems and renewable energy.

His extensive knowledge on electrical machines gives him a unique perspective on REE. These elements are essential to many modern technologies, from phones to cars.

“There are 17 elements that are considered rare earth minerals,” EL-Refaie said. “From an electrical machine perspective, there are five of those elements that are used in permanent magnets. There is neodymium, samarium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium.”

These five elements play a critical role in the development of modern technologies, powering things like speakers, wind turbines and hybrid and electric vehicles. They are essential for creating permanent magnets. Permanent magnets refer to materials that create their own persistent magnetic field without an external power source. Each element has its own magnetic and electronic properties, and they create a much stronger magnetic force than electromagnetics, like batteries, for example.

Access to REE is essential for technological developments but accessing them isn’t easy. China has a stronghold on the supply of them, according to EL-Refaie.

“That’s part of the geopolitical issue around those materials. It’s not that they are rare, but there is an abundance of them, mainly in China,” he said. “They just have an abundance of mines, and the labor there is much cheaper. There are some mines in the United States that the government is trying to revive now, but extracting these materials domestically is going to be very expensive.”

Relying on China for the supply of these valuable elements only adds to geopolitical pressures. If there is tension between the United States and China, the supply chain for REE can become negatively affected.

Rare earth elements have hovered in the conversation about the current United States interest in acquiring Greenland, as the island has the largest untapped rare earth deposits in the world. Greenland ranks eighth in the world for REE, but no rare earth mining has taken place on the island. The demand for REE could feed into Trump and his allies’ drive for Greenland.

“You would think that rare earths would be very difficult to mine or extract,” EL-Refaie said. “It’s basically a big, huge island of ice. You wouldn’t think that this would be cost effective to mine these materials from Greenland.”

The island poses a harsh geography—one that is incredibly difficult to mine. The native culture in Greenland also highly values the environment, and mining would pose a negative impact to the local environment.

Whether or not these minerals are top of Trump’s priority list for Greenland is up for debate. In January, he said at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos, Switzerland, that “Greenland is a vast, almost entirely uninhabited and undeveloped territory, sitting undefended in a key strategic location between the United States, Russia and China. It’s not important for any other reason. You know, everyone talks about the minerals. There’s no rare earth. No such thing as rare earth. There’s rare processing, but there’s so much rare earth, then to get to this rare earth, you have to go through hundreds of feet of ice. That’s not the reason we need it.”

Even if rare earths aren’t one of Trump’s driving forces for taking over Greenland, the untapped potential has become appealing to both the administration and tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. The Department of Energy announced $134 million in funding to strengthen REE supply chains late last year.

EL-Refaie said that REE and their use in permanent magnets is very valuable in performance of modern technologies.

“They give you by far the best performance in terms of efficiency, in terms of the size of the generators and motors used. That affects, obviously, the cost and size of the final product,” he said. “Whenever this issue of sustainability and the geopolitical issues around magnets flare out, some companies have been moving away from permanent magnet machines. They are using other types of machines that would give you lower performance. If there is stability and availability of this earth material, just being able to rely on permanent magnet machines, that by itself buys you significant improvement in performance.”

For the United States to keep up with China’s supply and continue developing technology and the country’s national security, securing an independent supply chain is a must.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.